Category Archives: Diplomacy

One reason the First World War outside Western Europe has been consigned to obscurity by modern popular history is that the world order of the day dictated posterity’s priorities. To clarify that deeply pompous preamble, most places outside the centres of global wealth and power in the early 20th century seemed relatively unimportant to contemporaries studying or writing about the War, the loudest and most numerous of whom came from the centres of global wealth and power. In other words, the West wrote the history and bequeathed its priorities of the day to future generations.

One reason I write this stuff is because a lot of those places that seemed relatively unimportant during the War – and in many cases for a long time afterwards – have become central to the way our world runs today. Africa, the Middle East, Japan, the USA, the outer reaches of Europe and the Caucasus, you name it, the First World War helped shape it and it really matters today. That brings me to the empire that was, in 1917, a strife-torn, crumbling, apparently decadent, politically feeble carcass ripe for dismemberment, and is now the world’s most formidable centre of wealth and power.

So how was the world war playing in China, and why did the Chinese government sever diplomatic relations with the Central Powers on 14 March 1917? With apologies for my fairly random selections from the Chinese-to-English spelling multiverse, here’s some background.

The Chinese Empire was in very bad shape when the War broke out, and had been for some time. Politically isolated and industrially backward, its population of around 420 million (in 1911) was ruled, at least in theory, by the Manchu dynasty during the late nineteenth century, but the imperial government’s power was under republican pressure in Beijing and, with individual warlords in control of the provinces, barely extended beyond the region immediately around the city.

The 1890s had seen the Empire lose control of Taiwan and Korea after military defeat by an expansionist Japanese Empire, and concede economic control to European empires across large swathes of the southern coastal zone. Outrage at European penetration triggered the 1900 Boxer Rebellion by nationalist elements in Beijing, but its main effect was to give European powers an excuse to increase their military presence in China. Meanwhile, in northeast, the Japanese were establishing economic and political control over the vastness of Manchuria, a process hastened after Japan effectively eliminated the competition with victory over Russia in the war of 1904–05.

This prolonged series of imperial disasters came home to roost in October 1911, when republican revolution erupted in Beijing. Led by Sun Yat-sen’s ‘Alliance Society’, it forced the child emperor’s abdication the following February, but within a few days Sun Yat-sen lost power to Yuan Shi-kai, who became president of the new republic and reorganised the Alliance Society as the Kuomintang Party. Yuan remained in office until his death in June 1916, but only ever controlled an enclave around Beijing while a rival Kuomintang government sat at Canton, a Japanese client regime ran Manchuria and the rest of the provinces were ruled by independent warlords.

Sun Yat-sen was a major 20th-century figure, seen as the ‘father’ of post-imperial China… but his career amounted to a series of failures, and when a chance at success beckoned, in 1925, he died. Check him out anyway.

The outbreak of war in Europe didn’t provide China with the economic boost felt by so many other neutral states, partly because rapid economic expansion was virtually impossible in a vast country with only some 13,000km of railways, and partly because almost all modern Chinese industry was in foreign hands. Cotton and opium remained the country’s principle exports throughout the period, and the War’s main effect was to distract European powers from restraining the ambitions of Japan, which wasted no time seizing the German enclave of Tsingtao in 1914 and forced major economic concessions from China under the threat of war in early 1915 (18 January, 1915: Statement of Intent).

The Chinese government did, on the other hand, experience the diplomatic pressure to join both sides that was common to most neutral states after August 1914. Yuan and his strongly pro-Allied prime minister, Tuan Chi-jui, favoured British over German advances because they promised an end to reparations owed since the Boxer Rebellion, but never came close to achieving a consensus among neutralist nationalists or warlords with better things to do. After Yuan’s death in June 1916, Tuan Chi-jui remained prime minister under his successor, Li Yuan-hung, and overrode opposition from both the president and the Kuomintang to pursue negotiations with the Allies.

Negotiations bore fruit in the diplomatic break with Germany and Austria-Hungary, voted into effect by Tuan’s cabinet on 14 March 1917 and followed by seizure of the half dozen German ships in Chinese ports. Having simply ignored opposition, Tuan was ready to go the whole way, but on the same day president Li and the Beijing parliament joined forces to block any declaration of war. Tuan reacted by moving his headquarters north of Beijing and building up military strength, while Li and parliament pursued their new and hitherto unlikely alliance by voting Tuan out of office in April.

At this point, Chinese politics melted down into a summer of warlord mayhem, with Tuan threatening to attack the capital, Li and the Kuomintang summoning warlord Chang Hsun to protect the city, and Chang instead seizing control as regent in the name of a restored emperor. The new emperor, Puyi, lasted a fortnight after his installation in the Forbidden City on 1 July, before Duan marched on Beijing in the name of the republic and Chang fled.

Beijing in 1917. Not industrialised.

In theory, the pro-Allied party had won the day. In practice the process of persuading China into the War, albeit carried out with less ferocity and urgency than the bullying directed at more strategically useful neutrals, put a wrecking ball through the fragile edifice of Chinese central government. Republican politicians forced from Beijing by Chang’s short-lived coup fled to Canton, which became the centre of mounting political and military opposition to new president Feng Kuo-chang, the former vice-president and an ally of Tuan, who replaced Li on 18 July. China would go on to declare war against the Central Powers in August, a move that made little or no strategic difference to the wider conflict and barely impinged on the sprawling, violent internal disorder that consumed the vast majority of Chinese energies and resources for the duration, and for decades after the War.

I’m not for one moment suggesting that the Chinese Republic would have prospered if European empires had left the place alone during the First World War. Its constituency of squabbling nationalists and old-school warlords was a civil war waiting to happen and showing no signs of immediate resolution, while white imperialists can’t really be blamed for Japan’s altogether more disruptive behaviour. Then again, the casual (and in this case primarily British) diplomatic vandalism that helped turn Beijing into a war zone for a few months in 1917 had no real strategic justification, and was yet another case of the imperial fever that accompanied the new concept of ‘total war’. As understood in 1917, total war was an all-consuming fight to the finish that threatened the losers with extinction, providing European empires with all the justification they needed for ruthless pursuit of every alliance, sphere of influence or resource base, however trivial.

Just as they did in Greece, in Portugal, in the Middle East and pretty much everywhere else in the world, European diplomats and strategists brought only trouble to China during the First World War. Memoirs suggest many of them were aware of the damage they were causing but considered it necessary for the protection of their own homelands. They had no reason to believe that their homelands might one day be materially altered, even threatened, by changes in what were then geopolitically unimportant, often distant countries. On the other hand they, and the generation of historians that came after them, had every reason to suppose that the Chinese Empire was doomed to disintegration and of little significance to the futures of their homelands – but they were wrong, and we know that now, so maybe posterity should re-jig its priorities and pay some attention to the ways we messed with China.

A hundred years ago today, the Petrograd Conference broke up. Called for the purpose of assessing and improving Russia’s contribution to the Allied war effort, and Allied contributions to the Russian war effort, it had lasted 20 days and achieved very little. All the same, the fact that it took place at all and the ways in which it failed do add up to an interesting glimpse at what an alliance between Britain, France and Russia really meant in 1917, as well as providing a snapshot of Russian imperial government immediately before it collapsed.

In any war you care to consider, at any time in history, coalitions mean conferences, whether called to coordinate the efforts of allies during a war or to share out the spoils at its end. These days, international conferences at any level can take place without participants leaving their screens, and pre-industrial conferences among military allies ended to take place in the tent next to the battlefield. In between, international conferences involved a lot of overseas travel.

The First World War took place just before technology took the sting out of overseas travel. Conferences between widely separated allies remained arduous and potentially dangerous undertakings, usually conducted during the military quiet periods of mid-winter or high summer to reduce the risk of some major strategic change during the slow process of convening the delegates.

This basic logistic problem was one reason why it took the Allies until the end of 1915 to organise a major conference in France (8 December, 1915: Chat Lines), and the main reason why it was difficult to arrange any kind of conference between the Allies and Russia. If getting a few Russian delegates to France represented an achievement, nobody wanted to ship boatloads of Allied delegates to Russia for a conference unless absolutely necessary. By the middle of 1916, from both sides of the alliance, it was beginning to seem absolutely necessary.

Petrograd, as it was called between 1914 and 1924, was further from western Europe than this looks.

From a Russian perspective (as if perspective was a factor in imperial Russian government), the alliance wasn’t providing anything like enough military, supply or financial support. Officials in Petrograd regarded the war on the Eastern Front as vital to the future of the Western Front, and believed that the Allies – and particularly Russia’s prime supplier, Britain – were holding back supplies because they failed to appreciate this fact. Russian diplomats had meanwhile been unable to soften Britain’s hostility to unilateral trade between Russia and the USA, an attitude Petrograd put down to jealousy.

From an Allied point of view, the real problem with supplying the Russians was the Russian regime. Shiploads of supplies were known to be rotting in dockyards that were simply not equipped to deal with the amount of traffic being sent from the West, let alone with the hundred percent increase the Russians were demanding. The western Allies also doubted that military aid was being used properly when it did arrive, and the same applied to the financial credit being extended to Russia. As for unilateral transatlantic trade, the British in fact feared that Russian business methods, considered cavalier and untrustworthy, could destabilise Allied relations with the USA.

Behind all these concerns lay a deep Allied mistrust of the Russian political and bureaucratic systems, and a mounting belief that the only way to sort them out was to go to Russia, find out what was really happening there and arrange support accordingly. This was the main reason for Lord Kitchener’s trip to Russia in July 1916, which followed the failure of a London conference on Russian affairs, but his death en route postponed matters. During the autumn, as Russian demands for loans beyond the scope of current agreements sparked another round of fruitless discussions with diplomats, plans were finalised for a major conference at Petrograd in early 1917.

Led by cabinet ministers and senior generals, British, French and Italian delegations finally reached Petrograd at the end of January, and after a few days of fractious preliminary meetings the conference opened officially on 1 February. It quickly became clear that a full plenary session would be so crowded that any serious progress would be impossible, so the conference was split into committees to deal separately with military, political, financial and supply issues. Even then, to the particular annoyance of British delegates, proceedings were slowed because a lot of senior Russian delegates were new to their jobs, such was the rate of ministerial turnover in the Tsar’s crumbling government, and by squabbling between rival Russian ministries.

The political committee had the easiest task, largely confined to confirming present arrangements and ensuring that all parties were aware of the others’ intentions. The military committee was essentially in the same position, although the western Allies were obliged to repeat their rejection, confirmed at the Rome Conference a few weeks earlier (7 January, 1917: Back Door Man), of Russian demands that Greece be compelled to join the War on the Allied side, using military force if necessary. Discussions about finance centred on Russia’s attempts to stop Britain demanding gold payments for loans made the previous year, and to secure unlimited credit for the duration of the War. They got nowhere, with Lord Milner, the head of the British delegation, eventually ending the debate by insisting on the need for further study.

Lord Milner’s worth a post of his own, and was a shadowy, influential figure among the British political elite. He was also a hard-core nationalist, imperialist kind of a guy…

The most important discussions and heated arguments were reserved for the knotty question of supplying Russia with military aid and trade. The Russians wanted more weapons from the western Allies, especially artillery, machine guns and rifles, but their negotiating technique reflected the regime they spoke for – inclined to fantasy, comfortable with fiction and naturally uncompromising – so they simply demanded huge numbers of everything. The British and French (Italy was asking, not giving) wanted realistic assessments of Russia’s actual needs and of how much Russian docks could actually handle. Supply would then depend on Allied estimates of what would constitute bang for buck on the field of battle. These were not compatible positions, and they hadn’t got much more compatible by the time the conference broke up.

The Petrograd Conference failed to instigate any real changes in policy or process, failed to elicit any signs of reasonable compromise from the Russian administration, and was quickly rendered null and void by revolution in Russia – but it did provide one or two small benefits to the Allied war effort. The Allies had learned to address all their issues with Russia as a coordinated whole, and their willingness to send important delegates such a long way had confirmed (to themselves and to Russians) the seriousness of their commitment to the alliance. This helped smooth relations with the new Provisional Government in Petrograd, and some of the more useful organisational reforms discussed at the Conference did survive to improve the flow of supplies in the months that followed.

Petrograd also gave us a last, damning glimpse of imperial Russian bureaucracy and government at work before the February Revolution (which took place in March by the western calendar) consigned them to history. The British, the French and the new Russian government were all quick to point the finger at the old regime when analysing the failings of the Conference, and I’m no apologist for the last Tsar’s catastrophic performance, but there is another side to that part of the story.

No matter how loudly they blamed Russian inefficiency, corruption and intransigence, the British had come to Petrograd with no intention of shifting their own position on supply and finance, or of admitting their own weakness in those matters. By early 1917, all Allied loan and credit arrangements were dependent on US agreement, and a Wilson administration desperate to find grounds for peace was in no mood to make generous arrangements with belligerent autocracies. Any major increase in supplies to Russia would also depend on US industry, which was already working to full capacity for its preferred Anglo-French clients, and anyway the rapid increase in losses to German submarines meant the British couldn’t spare any shipping to deliver more supplies. Nothing about any of this was going to change in Petrograd, and the British knew it.

So although it wasn’t the first, the last or anything like the most significant example of the practice, the Petrograd Conference was a reminder of how easily and often the presence of a convincing scapegoat can be used to distract history’s attention from the full picture.

It’s still January, the War is still quiet, and so I plan to spend the next hour or two telling three small tales about this week in 1917. None of them are particularly obscure or neglected by posterity, but they’re all interesting in their way and there’s a dash of world-historical significance to spice things up. They’re not really connected so let’s take them in chronological order, starting with the diplomatic black farce known as the Zimmermann Telegram or the Zimmermann Note.

Arthur Zimmermann was the German foreign minister in January 1917. He had only been in the post since November, and in political terms he can be dismissed as a creature of the military-industrial dictatorship that controlled Germany as the Third Supreme Command (29 August, 1916: The Blueprint). Zimmermann was thoroughly imbued with the gamblers’ optimism that characterised his masters, as demonstrated by his reaction to the decision, taken in mid-January, to adopt a strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

For reasons often discussed in the past, the decision meant that war with the United States was all but inevitable, which in turn meant Germany either had to win the War before America’s vast resources made it to Europe or prevent the US Army from coming to Europe at all. With the latter in mind, and encouraged by signs that collapse of the Russian war effort would release resources from the Eastern Front, Zimmermann wrote a note to the German ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, instructing him to offer an alliance to the Mexican government whenever war between Germany and the US became certain. In return for declaring war against the US, Mexico would receive generous funding and military support from Germany, along with the former Mexican territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, once victory was secured. By way of encouragement, Zimmermann suggested that Japan might be persuaded to join the alliance, thus keeping the US occupied on two fronts, neither of them anywhere near Germany.

Reality was not heavily involved here. Even if Mexico wanted a full-scale war with its northern neighbour, it was in midst of a very long series of revolutions and in no fit state to fight one, and Japan had shown no signs of wanting to abandon its very profitable and useful alliance with Britain, let alone being ready to fight a war against its powerful Pacific trade rival. The message could, on the other hand, have very real diplomatic effects if its contents were to reach Washington while Germany was at peace with the US. Berlin took precautions against this possibility, but they never stood a chance.

One of the Royal Navy’s first wartime jobs had been to cut Germany’s transatlantic cables, so Berlin had been communicating with its ambassadors in the western hemisphere using US cables, an arrangement accepted by the Wilson administration on the grounds that it might facilitate the progress of peace talks. Berlin considered the US cable system secure, and had agreed not to use it for coded messages, but cited security concerns to persuade the US embassy to accept the Zimmermann message in code. The message was delivered to the embassy on 16 January, and transmitted to Mexico via the German ambassador in Washington. Washington also thought its transatlantic cables were secure, but all traffic passed through a node near Land’s End, at the western tip of mainland Britain, where it was being tapped and passed on to the Royal Navy’s codebreaking centre, known as Room 40.

The Royal Navy’s Room 40 broke this code. Feel free to have a go.

Room 40 was in possession of German diplomatic ciphers and had cracked the gist of the message within a day or so, but the codebreakers sat on the information for the next three weeks while they thought up ways to use it without their wire-tapping activities causing outrage in Washington. They eventually passed the telegram’s contents to the British foreign office on 5 February, five days after Germany’s public declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare had effectively ended the diplomatic battle for American support.

Another two weeks passed before the first US official read a transcript, by which time the British had made up a couple of plausible alternative sources for the intelligence. It was shown to the US ambassador in London on 20 February, reached Wilson in Washington a few days later, and was released to the American press on 28 February, giving a predictable and enormous boost to anti-German sentiment in the States at a very important time.

There isn’t much need to elaborate on the connections between our modern world and a document that helped get the USA involved in European affairs, except perhaps to paraphrase the incomparable Barbara Tuchmann by pointing out an unhappy consistency in the fruits of Prussian diplomacy, so I’ll move on to that week’s most disastrous by-product of the British class system.

Silvertown, a poverty-raddled East London suburb, had a nasty recent history as the capital’s industrial hellhole, a place where really noxious factories just outside the city’s regulatory reach were surrounded by the homes of their workforces. Among many chemicals companies operating in the area in the 1900s, Brunner, Mond & Co (a future original component of ICI) produced soda crystal and caustic soda until production of the latter ended in 1912, leaving half of the plant idle. In mid-1915, when the British Army was facing potentially critical shell shortages, the War Office requisitioned the spare half of the factory for production of high-grade, ‘purified’ TNT, despite protests that the process was too dangerous to be carried out in crowded areas, a view shared by the Brunner, Mond chemists who had invented the process.

Handling TNT was bad for workers, who suffered from a variety of side effects, including skin discolouration and nausea, but that kind of war wound could be described as unavoidable, whereas the British government could and did site many TNT factories in lightly populated, rural areas, where their well recognised tendency to explode was less of a hazard to life and property. These considerations didn’t spare poor, crowded Silvertown, neglected for the benefit of capital as a matter of passive government policy for the previous seventy years, and TNT production began in September 1915. On 19 January 1917, Silvertown paid the price, when fire broke out and, at 6.52pm, ignited 50 tonnes of stored TNT.

It was the biggest explosion in the history of London (though bigger TNT explosions took place in other wartime factories). The TNT factory and a number of surrounding buildings were wiped out at once, while debris destroyed goods and damaged property for miles around, fires raged all over Silvertown (and in a Greenwich gasometer hit by flying debris), and the sound of the blast, which shook buildings all over London, was heard as far away as Norfolk and the south coast. Had it not been evening, when most factory personnel were off work, the total of 73 dead and more than 400 injured would have been much higher, as would the £4 million paid out by the government in compensation to individuals and businesses affected by the explosion. Just so you sort of know, my laptop says £4 million in 1917 is the equivalent of between – wait for it – about £200 million and about £1.75 billion today. Could be that’s the main reason the British government stopped opening TNT factories in urban areas.

Lastly, and by way of getting up to date, the night of 22 January saw a burst of lethal derring-do in the North Sea. Cruisers from the Royal Navy’s Harwich Force – a collection of destroyers, light cruisers and smaller craft dedicated to patrolling eastern and south-eastern approaches to British home waters – intercepted the ten ships of a German Navy destroyer flotilla around the Schouwen Bank, about 30km off the Rhine Delta. In a brief exchange of fire between the cruisers’ guns and the destroyers’ torpedoes, two German destroyers were heavily damaged before the rest escaped, only to run into a flotilla of British destroyers, which inflicted serious damage on a third destroyer but lost one of its own, HMS Simoom, torpedoed and sunk at a cost of 47 lives. Again the actual combat was fleeting, though undertaken at what an eyewitness described as ‘pistol range’, before both sides ran for home.

The doomed Simoom… if anyone asks, a simoom is a desert wind occurring in Arabia and the Sahara.

I mention this essentially insignificant scrap because I’ve been inclined to focus on the timidity with which expensive, prestigious major warships were used during the First World War. The Schouwen Bank action is a reminder that battleships weren’t the only warships out there, and that the rather pointless war fought by the dreadnoughts doesn’t reflect either the experience of most serving warships or the (non-existent) generalised failure of wartime naval operations that is such a favourite heritage headline. What’s more, timidity had very little to do with rapid retreat from a night action, which was a deadly, terrifying game of cat and mouse played almost blind, with every shadowy ship in the darkness a potential friend or enemy, and every manoeuvre in crowded areas a collision waiting to happen. When enemy ships ran away in the dark, chasing around to find them in a crowded, active naval theatre was not a smart move before radar changed the game.

As world wars go, this one was pretty quiet at the start of 1917. The Western Front had reverted to its particular version of inactivity, the patchwork violence of trench raids and minor attacks defined by the very British concept of ‘permanent offensive’, and on the Eastern Front – inevitably quiet during Eastern Europe’s ferocious midwinter – the last rites of the Central Powers’ attack into Romania were the only substantial military activity.

Elsewhere, the Italian, Caucasian and Salonika fronts were quiet, and an uneasy standoff existed in East Africa, with German forces confined to the south of the colony and the British still busy replacing European and Indian troops with as many African soldiers as they could mobilise. The slow, steady preparation for British operations in Palestine, from forward defence of the Suez Canal to invasion, was approaching completion, and a limited British offensive was taking place in Mesopotamia. The latter was making fast progress towards Baghdad, but we’ve been to Mesopotamia lately and we’ll be back there soon, so I’ll give the preliminary battles their due then.

This relative lack of carnage, which had encouraged talk of a compromise peace during December, encourages me to talk about peaceful things – like Denmark.

On 16 January 1917, US president Woodrow Wilson ratified the purchase from Denmark of what had been the Danish West Indies and subsequently became the US Virgin Islands. This was a rare moment in the headlines for wartime Denmark, and most Danes tend to see the First World War as little more than a passing nuisance, not central to the country’s twentieth-century development. With all due respect to anyone Danish, this is only half true.

A constitutional monarchy since the mid-19th century, Denmark had lost its southern provinces and 150,000 of its people to Germany after the Second Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864, and was one of Europe’s smallest states in 1914, with a population of less than three million. Though its industrial and urban development had kept pace with the most advanced European countries, it retained a predominantly agricultural economy that had made a highly successful switch from grain to pork and dairy production since the 1870s, and that sustained Europe’s most prosperous farmers.

Agricultural products accounted for 90 percent of Denmark’s exports and, underpinned by a thriving merchant navy, much of the nation’s wealth. This was reflected in the country’s political development, which embraced contemporary socialism (especially in modern, industrialised Copenhagen) but centred on liberal and social democratic attempts to curb the power of major landowners by opening up the country’s narrow electoral franchise.

Since the country was also dependent on imports for food, energy and manufacturing raw materials, international trade was obviously very important to Denmark, and its two main trading partners in 1914 were Germany and Great Britain. When war broke out between them, Denmark could only choose neutrality, but the fact that it shared a long, scary frontier with Germany, and couldn’t hope to defend it, soon forced the Danish government to play favourites.

Denmark’s only strategic importance to the belligerent powers lay in a geographical position that controlled access to the Baltic Sea, and in August 1914, at Berlin’s request and in spite of a promise to Britain, the Danish Navy began laying minefields across the narrow straits separating Denmark from Sweden. The Navy spent the rest of the War tending the minefields, while the 58,000-strong Danish Army remained clustered around Copenhagen, the only part of the country considered defensible if the Germans decided to march in and take over.

Danish naval squadrons spent four years protecting the minefields that guarded the Baltic.

Invasion from the south remained a possibility throughout the War. It seemed most likely at the start of the conflict, when collective insecurity triggered a run on gold deposits in Danish banks. With the country’s political parties committed to a cooperative truce for the duration, a coalition government responded by suspending convertibility of the national currency, the Krøne, into gold, and followed up with a raft of emergency laws that gave it control over prices, food supplies and exports. These measures were primarily designed to ensure fair distribution of resources in the face of inevitable shortages, but control of exports also added to the government’s bargaining power with warring powers desperate for supplies.

With wartime inflation running close to 20%, subsequent measures provided (and later increased) welfare provision for poorer citizens, introduced government subsidies to keep down prices of fuel and essential foodstuffs, and responded to housing shortages by regulating rents and offering tax exemptions to housing developers. Progressive taxation was also introduced to counter both the strain on public finances – partly caused by keeping the armed forces mobilised throughout the conflict – and excessive profiteering.

All this interventionism, new to Denmark and similar in nature to governmental developments in belligerent European states, worked reasonably well, as did the diplomatic balancing act performed by a government that spent its time convincing both sides that trade with an independent, neutral Denmark was to their advantage. Once the uncertainty of the War’s opening phase had passed, Danish society and economy adjusted to its requirements in relative comfort… for a couple of years.

By the summer of 1916, a change at the top in Germany appeared imminent, and the prospect revived fears of an invasion aimed at breaking (or at least stretching) the Allied naval blockade by occupying Norwegian and Danish ports. Nervousness in Denmark was echoed by worsening relations with equally worried Allied countries, and by alarm in the United States, which saw the Danish West Indies (the Caribbean islands of St. John, St. Croix and St. Thomas) as part of the western gateway to the Panama Canal, and was determined to take control of them before Germany could invade.

Here they are…

The Danish government had no good reason to keep the islands, which were economically depressed and expensive to run, and had agreed to sell them to the US twice before, in 1867 and 1902. The US Senate had rejected the first treaty of sale, essentially to spite unpopular Secretary of State Seward, and the Danish upper house had rejected the second, largely because of fears that a US administration would mistreat the islands’ predominantly black population. The same fears were expressed when Danish authorities rejected a fresh offer of purchase in October 1915, but Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, kept on asking, eventually making it clear that the US would seize the islands rather than let them fall into German hands. Menaced by Germany and under pressure from Britain, Denmark could ill afford to make an enemy of the US, which was likely to impose selective restrictions on neutral trade from its shores if and when it joined the Allies, and the Danish ambassador signed a preliminary treaty of sale in New York on 4 August 1916.

The treaty did not secure rights of US citizenships for the islands’ residents, nor did it grant them a say in the matter, but by December it had passed through both Danish houses of parliament and a national plebiscite. The US Senate ratified the treaty in September, but Wilson delayed his own signature until 16 January 1917, by which time all hope of imposing peace on the world had faded and US relations with Germany had virtually collapsed. The formal transfer of power took place on 31 March, at which point the US paid Denmark $25 million in gold and the US Navy took administrative control of the islands. Island natives eventually received full citizenship rights in 1932, but that’s another story, as is the considerably less prosperous neutrality endured by the Danes after the US entered the War.

Like it or not, here’s Uncle Sam.

It’s easy to see why the First World War is no big deal in Denmark, where commemoration is largely focused on the 35,000 Danes from German-controlled Schleswig-Holstein who were conscripted to fight for Germany and the 6,000 of them who died, along with the three hundred or so Danish merchant ships sunk during the conflict and some 800 sailors who lost their lives. Otherwise, the post-War return of northern Schleswig to Danish control is recognised as a turning point in the country’s modern history, but much of the state’s wartime legislation was dismantled in the early 1920s and is largely forgotten, while the country’s economy quickly returned to something like its pre-War condition. A new constitution was introduced in 1915, widening the franchise and allowing women to vote for the first time, but it was the product of pre-War political dynamics and not influenced by the course of the conflict.

On the other hand, as they did in so many other developed European countries, wartime organisational needs forced an enormous, lasting growth in the reach and power of Danish unions and employers’ associations. They also spawned a political truce that propelled the country’s emerging social democrats to governmental responsibility and laid the foundations for an alliance with the liberal left that went on to shape Danish society for the next forty-five years. Perhaps most significantly, the country’s geopolitical position was fatefully altered by its years of neutrality, because experience of Allied blockade tactics during the First World War convinced German planners to occupy Denmark during the Second.

Just so you know, Danes serving in the German Army fought and died on the Western Front.

This has been a long, flimsy piece of journalism, and aside from telling another small tale of big people bullying little people, it has only one, small point to make – that the First World War changed the lives of almost every citizen in the developed world, even those that think it passed them by.

If you thought 2016 was bad – and let’s face it most people did – cheer yourself up by imagining how ghastly the world looked at the end of 1916. Feeling better? Good, now get past the heritage notion that everyone running the world a century ago was stupid, and think about how a smart person like you, equipped with a hundred years of hindsight, might have changed things at the start of 1917.

It’s a tricky one. You could take an extreme pacifist position and walk away at all costs, forcing peace for its own sake, but only by betraying every clarion call and sacrifice since 1914, and only by leaving the enmities of 1914 unresolved, primed to start another war. This was morally and politically impossible for anyone in a position of power in any of the main belligerent nations.

Perhaps you could parley for peace, persuade the warring empires to swap compromises in the face of escalating slaughter and socio-economic mayhem – but both the German Chancellor and the President of the United States had just tried that, only to discover that neither side was ready or willing to give an inch. Given that the Allies had framed their entire case for war as an outraged mission to save civilisation, and that only total victory could save the regime directing the Central Powers, you might as well forget about the spirit of compromise.

So you’re going to have to keep fighting this war, and aiming for final victory, but surely an intelligent, open-minded leader can find a quicker and less costly route to goal than the hideous attrition of the Western Front, or for that matter the Eastern and Italian Fronts. Well, the British and French have tried this before, only to land in trouble at Gallipoli and strategic quicksand at Salonika. Meanwhile the British Empire, the only Allied state with any resources to spare elsewhere, is already busy fighting sideshow wars in the Middle East, in Africa and across the world’s oceans, and any day now the German Third Supreme Command is going to bet its collective shirt on the almighty short-cut of all-out submarine warfare. In other words, you’ll struggle to find any viable new route to victory, let alone one you can get past the combined scepticism of military and political forces still fixated on the main European fronts.

Generations of intelligently applied hindsight have failed come up with a convincing alternative to the ‘keep marching to the light’ approach adopted by leadership on both sides during the second half of the War, so it’s no wonder that even the most creative British statesperson of modern times couldn’t crack the problem. Newly installed as British Prime Minister, at the very peak of his political power and influence, David Lloyd George gave it a characteristically bold try, but by the time the Rome Conference of Allied leaders ended on 7 January 1917, he knew he had failed.

I’m a big fan of Lloyd George. I’m not planning to go into details here, but few people with his energy, pragmatism, vision, boldness and cunning get to achieve much in modern politics while keeping their ideals on the side of the angels. Despite a list of personal flaws to match his gifts, Lloyd George entered office on the back of a brilliant record as both a reformer of British society and its prime organiser for total war. Though the War years burned him out politically, and his career never fully recovered from association with the universally unloved post-War peace settlement, he was a fearless and confident figure throughout the conflict, and at the end of 1916 he was determined to force it to a swift, victorious conclusion.

Ruthlessly effective at streamlining government and bureaucracy to meet wartime needs, Lloyd George was equally adept at shaping press and popular opinion – but though his work on the home front established a platform upon which victory could be built, persuading the military to complete the task his way presented an altogether more formidable challenge. Broadly speaking the Army, led by Chief of Staff Robertson and BEF commander Haig, was absolutely committed to maintaining maximum focus on the Western Front, and sure the War would be won or lost in France, while Lloyd George was equally sure that victory could be achieved more quickly and less painfully by attacking the Central Powers through a back door.

The trouble was, as mentioned earlier, most of the back doors had been tried and found locked, or at least extremely difficult to open, and though the prospect of an attack on the underbelly of the Ottoman Empire still beckoned in the Middle East, nobody expected it to defeat Germany. Given the abject performance of Allied forces in Salonika, it was clear that nothing the British Army could do was likely to have much effect on the Eastern Front’s overall picture, and that left Lloyd George with few new options for lateral thinking except the unlikely scenario he came up with: an attack into the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Italy.

In military terms, it wasn’t a great idea. Lloyd George wasn’t far wrong in thinking that Vienna’s empire was ripe for collapse, but the Italian Army was going to need a lot of reinforcement and the Italian Alps were still a blood-soaked nightmare for offensive operations. That didn’t stop Lloyd George suggesting the transfer of British and French heavy artillery to Italy within a week of taking office, and he took the idea further at a meeting of Anglo-French leaders on Boxing Day, when delegates accepted his proposal for a summit between the British, French and Italian high commands to discuss overall strategic priorities. Robertson and Haig were unimpressed, and were placing obstacles and objections in the path of any serious military aid to Italy within a matter of days. This was to be expected, but might be overcome if the combined weight of French and Italian opinion could be convinced to swing behind Lloyd George.

The summit convened as the Rome Conference on 5 January. Lloyd George asked delegates to consider increasing military aid to Russia and increasing the strength of Allied forces in Salonika. He also urged the development of joint offensive strategies on the Italian Front, supported by the transfer of Anglo-French artillery and infantry to the theatre. The Italian high command had no problem with the latter idea, and Italian Army c-in-c Cadorna agreed to mount a major offensive provided the Allies added at least 300 heavy guns to his artillery. At first the British and French military commands, neither of which had any official advance warning of the proposal, made it clear they had no guns or troops to spare for the Italian Front, but under pressure they agreed to loan the Italian Army some heavy artillery – only for the French to qualify the offer by insisting on the return of the guns by April. Cadorna pointed out, quite rightly, that Italy couldn’t possibly mount an offensive in the Alps before April, and the conference broke up on 7 January without any firm arrangements on the table, let alone agreed.

When the French Army complained it was hard to get guns from the Somme to the Italian Alps, it had a point.

Lloyd George had been thwarted by the military on both sides of the Channel, had received no substantial support from the French government and, with a characteristic disregard for military realities, declared himself let down by Cadorna’s refusal of a bad offer. His battle against Robertson and Haig was far from over, and the rest of the year would see him manoeuvring to curb their control over strategic direction, but the cross-Channel military solidarity displayed at the Rome Conference set a pattern that precluded any fundamental change in military priorities. From the other perspective, Italian delegates at the Conference came away confirmed in their view that Britain and France were serious about wanting a major offensive into southern Austria-Hungary, but weren’t prepared to pay for it.

The Rome Conference was a failure, but is worth remembering as a nod to the largely forgotten efforts of those trying to alter the character of the First World War at what seemed its hour of deepest gloom. It also merits commemoration as the start of something, because despite Italian scepticism the Conference forced Anglo-French military leaders to at least examine the position on the Italian Front. New French c-in-c Nivelle visited the front in February; Robertson followed in March. What they saw convinced them that the Italian Army, operating far less sophisticated defence systems than those in use on the Western Front, might well need reinforcement, if not for an offensive then for credible defence against any major attack by Austrian or German forces. British and French commanders began formulating plans for the rapid transfer of guns and troops to Italy in the event of a crisis, and these would prove extremely valuable when crisis came the following autumn.

A hundred years ago, as the horror story of 1916 ground towards its end, talk of peace was in the air – but it had nothing to do with Christmas. It sprang instead from the fear felt by two individuals, powerful and experienced politicians facing the prospect of their best-laid plans coming to abject grief. Though they were only a month apart in age, German Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg and US President Woodrow Wilson didn’t have much else in common, but within the space of a week each felt moved to take a personal stab at halting the First World War.

Just look at Woodrow, folks! One pitch and he thinks he can save the world! He also thinks he’s living in the same world as…Bethmann-Hollweg, who’d never been a soldier but wore a general’s uniform anyway.

Bethmann-Hollweg, the epitome of Prussian political orthodoxy, born and married into its elite inner circle, had been Chancellor since 1909 and had survived in office by reacting to, rather than attempting to overly influence, the moves made by a dominant military. Like any good political survivor he was a wind direction expert, and he had long supported the growing influence of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, backing their demands for concentration on the Eastern Front against the less cavalier, west-facing strategy pursued by Chief of General Staff Falkenhayn.

The Chancellor remained onside once Ludendorff and his figurehead took power as the Third Supreme Command in late August 1916, and he announced their recipe for a supercharged war effort, the Hindenburg Programme, as government policy in September – but he didn’t share the belief that the German economy, bullied out of slack complacency and boosted by resources from the Army’s conquests, could outpunch its enemies. Having helped unleash a military-industrial combine bent on turning Germany into a socioeconomic runaway train, and unable to impose any kind of restraint or to prevent its huge gamble on the war-winning potential of all-out submarine warfare, an outbreak of peace was Bethmann-Hollweg’s only hope of avoiding the disastrous flame-out he foresaw.

For reasons obvious to anyone with a reasonable sense of self-preservation, the Chancellor had spent much of the autumn hoping someone else would bring about peace. Woodrow Wilson was by far the most likely candidate, both because he was a liberal pacifist to the tips of his fingers and because only the USA had the power to stop the War by cutting supplies to the belligerents. After Wilson had secured a second term at the White House on a pacifist ticket, and the vast battles on the Western Front had subsided into stalemate, Bethmann-Hollweg waited in vain for such apparently ideal circumstances to generate a peace initiative from Washington.

Hope faded as the weeks passed, so on 12 December the Chancellor took the plunge and led with his only playable card. On behalf of the Central Powers, he proposed peace talks on the basis of frontiers as they then stood, backing the proposal with claims that German force of arms had defined the War so far and could not be beaten. This was not a strong lead. It was never going to impress the Allies, committed as they were (strategically and publicly) to reversing German conquests and punishing the perpetrators, and they duly rejected it out of hand. Meanwhile any hope that the prospect of quitting while Germany was ahead might prompt the Third Supreme Command and its backers to pursue peace (rather than the do-or-die option of all-out submarine warfare) proved completely illusory. Bethmann-Hollweg’s slightly more plausible best bet – that evidence of German interest in peace might persuade the US administration to force the issue – did appear to generate a reaction from Wilson, but didn’t come close to flushing out an ace that could end the War.

Wilson wanted peace. He had campaigned as a peacemaker, he saw himself as a peacemaker and he too viewed the exhausted, deadlocked end of the Somme and Verdun battles as a good moment for a newly re-elected president to broker peace. What’s more, this seemed a good time for the President to act as a genuinely neutral mediator because US relations with the Allies were at a low and US-German relations were on something of a high.

Despite strong cultural links with Britain and France, despite widespread American sympathy for those nations under attack by the Central Powers, and despite the huge economic boom built on the USA’s position as the Allies’ chief supplier of finance and war materials, US politicians and public were unhappy with the British in 1916. They had been infuriated by the obvious distaste for a negotiated peace expressed by the British government, by British suppression of Irish civil rights after that year’s Easter Rising in Dublin, and by Britain’s blundering high-handedness around the enforcement of its naval blockade (28 July, 1916: Special Relationship?).

At the same time, US relations with Germany had been relatively positive since the spring, when the furore surrounding the sinking of the Sussex – an English Channel ferry packed with civilians, some of them American – had persuaded Berlin to issue the ‘Sussex Pledge’, by which the German Navy agreed to stop U-boats from attacking unarmed, non-military shipping without warning. As long as the Pledge held, so would the US electorate’s mandate for peace, but the President’s hopes of avoiding, let alone ending the War would be dead if the German High Command, fighting on three fronts and required to support all its allies, sought total victory through submarine warfare.

So Wilson was in a hurry to do something peaceable once he was safely back in the White House, and was planning to approach the belligerents in mid-December – but Bethmann-Hollweg’s initiative of 12 December gave him second thoughts, on the grounds that any US move at that point might be interpreted as pro-German. Having thought twice, Wilson went ahead and acted anyway, sending identical notes to all the belligerents on 18 December. By way of avoiding any direct association with Bethmann-Hollweg’s proposal, the notes were careful to neither demand peace nor offer US mediation, but merely invited all the belligerents to state their war aims as a means of facilitating future peace talks.

Even that modest idea proved far too radical for the empires at war. Without stating its war aims, the German government replied that, though it was of course anxious to end the conflict as soon as possible, it preferred direct negotiations between warring parties to any negotiation through a mediating power such as the USA. The British government, answering on behalf of the Allies, was more forthcoming on the subject of war aims, declaring that they required the Central Powers to evacuate occupied territory, pay indemnities for the trouble caused, and grant political freedom to those central European peoples subject to Austro-Hungarian or German control. These were not aims designed to bring Germany to the negotiating table.

Taken together, the German proposal and the general response to Wilson’s note made it clear that, despite Bethmann-Hollweg’s fears for the future, neither side was really interested in a negotiated peace. Wilson nevertheless kept chasing what we would these days call his legacy, and what he saw as a new world order based on liberal principles. Talks between his chief foreign policy advisor, ‘Colonel’ Edward House, and the German ambassador to Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, raised the possibility of secret negotiations with a view to setting up peace talks, but in mid-January the Third Supreme Command once again rejected the idea of US mediation, making clear that it would only negotiate with belligerent powers.

Still Wilson didn’t give up, and on 22 January 1917 he delivered an oration to the Senate – known to history as the Peace Without Victory speech – that laid down his vision for a peaceful future and challenged the world to match it. The huge global impact of his words, their significance for the post-War world and the many controversies that surrounded them are important elements of the story to come, but as a postscript to the minor flurry of mid-December peace overtures the speech was irrelevant. By the time it was delivered, the Third Supreme Command had already secured Kaiser Wilhelm’s agreement to announce the resumption of unlimited submarine warfare on 1 February.

So the German ruling elite was going for victory because anything less would break its hold on power, while the Allies were going for victory because the stats said the Central Powers were almost exhausted, and because their two-year propaganda portrayal of evil German militarism demanded it. However much Bethmann-Hollweg and Wilson wanted to stop the War (for their own sakes), and however much war-weary populations agreed with them, peace stood no chance in December 1916.

For months now, the First World War has been locked into a second full year of wholesale military carnage on the main European land fronts. Major offensives have erupted at Verdun and the Somme in the west, in the Trentino Valley and on the Isonzo River in the south, across Galicia and Poland in the east – but none has yet brought decisive results or opened up any clear path to victory.

The same could be said of the various secondary fronts dotted around the planet. Although some offered avenues for the post-War ambitions of the empires concerned, the strictly colonial struggle for East Africa, the regional dispute between the Russian and the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus, the multi-pronged British invasion of Middle East and the crazy chaos around Salonika were all marginal to the search for overall victory by the Allies or the Central Powers. In short the military struggle on land was, as the heritage industry loves to point out, locked in stalemate.

The heritage boys and girls are also quite happy to remind us that the First World War was a ‘total war’, by which they mean whole societies and their economies were committed to (and crucial to) its prosecution… but they generally avoid following that argument to a logical conclusion that messes with their simplistic, confectionary narrative.

With whole societies involved – and in technological conditions that made decisive military victory at best unlikely – it stood to reason that the richest, most developed, organised and cohesive societies would eventually exhaust the socioeconomic resources of their enemies and claim victory. In other words, the fact of total war made military stalemate and unbreakable trench lines less fundamentally important (and less open to ridicule) than heritage history wants us to believe, because there was another way to win the War.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that contemporary generals, politicians and propagandists were well aware of economic warfare’s importance as an alternate, apparently certain route to glory, and used it frame the miserable excuse for a strategy that was attrition (14 July, 1916: Virtual Realities). Last week, I pointed up the long-term economic perspective taken by all the major belligerents. Today marks the centenary of a formal protest by the United States against the British Empire’s macro-economic policies, a low point in Anglo-American relations that brings together the two biggest questions surrounding economic warfare in 1916.

The first question, a live issue since 1914 and still being asked two years on, concerned the Allied blockade of sea trade to the Central Powers, led by the enormous Royal Navy. Would blockade bring total victory, as promised by British strategists and contemporary economists, and if so when? Or could German submarine warfare against Allied trade be expanded and refined to even up an economic balance of power that had, from the moment a quick military victory failed to materialise in 1914, been heavily weighted against the Central Powers?

The second question cut across the first and had the potential to render it all but irrelevant to the War’s final outcome. Would the United States, by far the world’s biggest and most important neutral economy, enter the War to slew the economic balance irrevocably in the Allies’ favour, and if so when?

Economists have been analysing the impact of the First World War on their particular field of interest ever since it ended, and the best they’ve managed so far is the unsurprising conclusion that US entry on the Allied side condemned the Central Powers – which were anyway fighting at a massive economic disadvantage in terms of available human and material resources – to certain defeat. This would hardly have shocked informed observers in 1916, but the modern tendency to assume that US alliance with Britain and France was inevitable, simply a matter of time, would have raised a few eyebrows.

There was no real danger of the USA joining the Central Powers. Germany’s motives for and conduct of the War were generally deplored in the US, a mood defined by the German Army’s deliberate terror tactics against civilians in Belgium, and lately reinforced by the Ottoman Empire’s treatment of Armenians (many of whom fled to the US and spread tales of genocidal atrocity). But that didn’t mean the United States wanted to side with Britain.

The great republic’s sympathies tended to lie with countries directly under the hammer of war – Belgium, Italy and France, for instance. Britain was seen in Washington (as it was in Berlin) as the main protagonist on the Allied side, and as an arrogant, greedy bully, fighting to squash any challenge to its long-term dominance of the global economy. The War as a whole was perceived by many in the US as a battle for supremacy between Europe’s two greatest economies, with the rest of the continent suffering in support roles, and nothing reinforced that view more powerfully than the ongoing Anglo-German struggle for control of the sea lanes.

Hatred of German submarine warfare and British blockade tactics informed the whole US political spectrum, from traditional isolationists who loathed and disdained European imperialism, to business interests determined to create their own sea-trading economic empire. And while the threat to life and property posed by U-boats was always likely to overtrump the Royal Navy’s aggressive but relatively civilised policing when it came to popular outrage, political and business interests were if anything more appalled by the systemic denial of their long-term economic destiny built into Britain’s blockade strategy. Viewed with anything like historical dispassion, this was a reasonable point of view.

Not that the British saw it that way. Seen from London, blockade was doing a good job of grinding down the enemy war effort, but doing it too slowly to guarantee the long-term prosperity of a British Empire haemorrhaging men, materials and money. Constant efforts were being made to tighten the blockade for greater efficiency, usually by assuming ever-greater powers to stop, search and seize neutral vessels suspected of trading with the enemy. The fact that neutral powers were legally entitled to trade with anyone they liked was seen as irrelevant during a fight that claimed to be between good and evil.

The British press in 1916 had no doubt that trading with the enemy was a heinous crime against civilisation, and its shrill outrage helped elevate the practice into something seen by many in Britain as a major obstruction to victory through blockade. It wasn’t, but every Brexit victim knows how attractive an easy fix for complex problems can be in times of crisis, so few British voices were raised in doubt when, on July 18 1916, the government issued a ‘Black List’ of 87 US-based companies accused or suspected of trading with the enemy, making it a criminal offence for any British company to trade or even correspond with them.

To the surprise of British interests without American experience (and nobody else), the list triggered a furious reaction in the US, bringing scathing rebukes from editors coast to coast, and helping cement continued pacifism (exactly the thing Britain didn’t want from the US) as the dominant theme of that year’s presidential election campaign. It also provoked the formal note of protest from Wilson’s government, delivered by the US Ambassador to London, Walter Hines Page, on 28 July.

You rule the waves, you make enemies…

The note marked a major crisis in Anglo-American relations. Though aware that it had made a mistake and anxious to defuse the situation, an increasingly shaky Asquith government didn’t dare climb down in the face of a British press and parliament roaring their outraged indignation at American reactions, and didn’t want to encourage similar protests from other neutral governments. Foreign minister Edward Grey therefore issued a statement refusing to retract the list, and although repeated negotiations over the following months produced a series of quiet reductions in the list’s scope, along with reversal of an initial threat to expand it, the British would not renounce their claim to impose trade restrictions on neutral states as a matter of right.

This was inevitable, given Britain’s need to maintain control over other neutral traders, but it went to the crux of US emotional and economic antipathy towards the old colonial foe, so by late 1916 the Black List controversy had contrived to make Britain even more unpopular than Germany with many Americans, and in particular with Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson had reacted to initial publication of the Black List with undisguised anger. He admitted to aides that he was ‘about at the end of my patience with Britain and the Allies’, and told his closest advisor, Colonel House, that he planned to consider restrictions on loans and exports to the Allies. As the row rumbled on through the autumn, and once he had been returned to office for a second term, Wilson made good his threat, putting federal pressure on US bank JP Morgan – which functioned as the British government’s wartime financial agent in the US – to limit the loans promised to Britain at the end of 1916, a move that threatened major disruption to Allied plans for offensives in 1917.

The British had painted themselves into a bad corner, and if Germany hadn’t managed to repair relations between London and Washington by taking submarine warfare beyond the point of US tolerance, the Black List might now be remembered as one of the War’s most calamitous diplomatic screw-ups. As it is, the controversy seems worth commemorating as a reminder that US friendship with Britain was a fragile and, in many eyes, unlikely state of affairs in 1916, and as proof that, although imperial Germany has quite rightly become a by-word for diplomatic incompetence (see for instance 3 December, 1915: Friendly Fires?), the insular, often unconscious arrogance of wartime British diplomacy could run it a good second.

Like this Austrian cartoon, most people thought the Paris Conference was all about British economic dominance. Not this time, not quite…

A hundred years ago today, participating nations ratified agreements reached by the Allied Economic Conference of 14-17 June 1916. This didn’t have much popular impact at the time, given the competition from cataclysmic military events in progress on various fronts, and has of course been left out of the heritage showreel. On the other hand, it did mark a significant step on a road from nineteenth-century laissez-faire economics to the kind of multinational economic cooperation embodied by, for instance, the European Union – so now seems a good time to give it a mention.

Any economic historians happening to blunder into this page should probably look away now, because I’m about to generalise, big time, about an area that’s hardly my special subject. I realise that makes this journalism rather than history, but here and now I don’t mind exposing my own relative ignorance if it reminds anyone of where we came from in matters of economic cooperation – so here goes.

Classic nineteenth-century global economics – and the trade networks of the imperial age were global, if not in the instant way we understand them now – were purely national (or imperial) in outlook and involved minimal government interference in the affairs of private businesses. This was essentially the situation on the outbreak of war in 1914, though the German government had been acting in close cooperation with national businesses since the late nineteenth century, manipulating tariffs and slanting legislation in ways that were seen elsewhere (particularly in France) as key to the amazing, expanding success of the German economy.

War put a huge and unprecedented strain on economic resources for all belligerent states, while profoundly altering international patterns of trade, migration and capital flow. Long before 1916, it had become clear to European businessmen and politicians that the prosperity and security of the economic world after the peace needed some serious attention.

Among the Central Powers, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman economies quickly slipped into dependence on German aid, and long-term economic planning was overwhelmingly concerned with maintenance of imperial integrity – in other words with restoring pre-War economic conditions – while the essentially pre-industrial Bulgarian economy was internationally irrelevant. In Germany, the struggle to maintain a war effort in the face of Allied naval blockade called for absolute concentration of resources on immediate needs, and planning for a post-War economy never progressed beyond a plan, discussed in 1914, to absorb conquered economies into a greater German economy. The same idea lay behind wartime German management of its allies’ economies, and after Russia’s collapse in 1917 it would be applied (with disastrous results for all concerned) to German-occupied Eastern Europe – but for obvious reasons it had no direct impact on European economic planning after the German empire’s defeat and collapse.

Among the Allies, wartime economic cooperation was less one-sided. Britain remained by far the wealthiest of the partners, and Serbia was no more economically relevant than Bulgaria, but France was one of the world’s most important economies, Italy was in the throes of rapid economic growth and industrial expansion, Russia was a potentially enormous economic player and Belgium’s small economy was usefully modern. Everyone was going broke by 1916, and piling up debts (above all to the USA) as the cost of total war mushroomed beyond all prior imagining, but although the western European allies practiced close wartime economic cooperation, debates about the War’s economic aftermath had so far been conducted within individual states. Most politicians tended to see future economics solely in terms of restoring national prosperity, and it was left to business leaders, along with some political supporters, to take the lead in seeking ways to ensure a future of international economic security and balance.

The latter approach offered three main options for Allied economies. The first and simplest was an attempt to rebuild the pre-War world of interdependent but competing individual economies. The second option, equally backward looking in its way, favoured a tightening of ‘imperial preference’ trade areas, in other words attempting to make pre-War European empires more macro-economically self-sufficient. A third, more radical strand of opinion foresaw a future world economy dominated and stabilised by giant blocs of cooperating states, broadly along the lines of current international alliances. It should come as little surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of European economics during the last two hundred years that, by early 1916, the idea of cooperating as a bloc was particularly favoured by the French government.

A group of French political economists, led by commerce minister Étienne Clémentel, had taken on board German plans for European economic dominance in 1914, noted the widespread wartime destruction of northern French and Belgian industry, and were determined not to squander military victory through post-War economic defeat. They identified post-War economic cooperation as a means for France to secure the raw materials and markets needed for protection against any revival of German economic power, and in December 1915 – immediately after the first inter-Allied strategic summit at Chantilly – Clémentel presented these arguments to the premier, Briand. Briand, already anxious to increase the depth of wartime economic cooperation, agreed to push for an allied economic conference and put post-War cooperation on the agenda.

A preliminary conference took place in late March, when delegates from France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Serbia and Portugal agreed in Paris on a completely pointless Declaration of Unity in military, economic and diplomatic affairs. The conference proper finally met – again in Paris and including delegates from the same states, as well as observers from the British dominions and the USA – over four days from 14 June 1916, when Clémentel presented his vision for mutual protection against any future revival German ‘economic slavery’ by formation of a post-War economic bloc that would exclude Germany. This, he proclaimed, would found ‘a new order of things, which will mark one of the dominant stages in the economic history of the world’. History would prove him right about multinational economic blocs, but 1916 wasn’t interested.

The French government’s ambitions for a prototype European economic union ran up against Italian and Russian unwillingness to abandon their pre-War links to German markets and technical expertise, and against the preference of some British and French industries for maintenance of their own pre-War trade with Germany. It also outraged Britain’s increasingly influential ‘white’ dominions, which (understandably) saw inter-European trade agreements as a threat to imperial preference. In the end, the conference resolutions ratified on 27 June (as the Paris Economic Pact) amounted to little more than an agreement to share wartime access to raw materials, along with a commitment to explore the possible benefits of long-term economic cooperation.

Nobody outside the French government, least of all Punch magazine, took the Paris Economic Pact very seriously.

So big ambitions but no big deal, yet the Allied Economic Conference resonated around the world and into the future.

Across the Atlantic, Clémentel’s idea of a European economic bloc was regarded with deep suspicion as a restriction on future American trade, and became a political issue that informed both the 1916 presidential election and President Wilson’s approach to the peace in 1919. The idea was also discussed among economists in Japan, where it was seen as a corollary to their own ambitions by those who envisaged a future Japanese zone of economic dominance in south-east Asia, and particularly in China.

Meanwhile, French governments would press for European cooperation against post-War German economic revival throughout the conflict – though with little more success than in 1916 – and the spectre would continue to dominate French economic thinking into the late 1940s. After that, fear of a potentially even more dangerous Soviet Union forced a switch of priorities and drove the French to join Germany in seeking security through pan-European economic union. The rest should be history, a tale of continental security through diplomatic and economic cooperation, but seems to have been polluted by the melodramatic myths of propaganda and national heritage – and that’s my only real excuse for quietly commemorating 1916’s fearful, stillborn contribution to the modern idea of the European Union.

You’ve probably heard of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and if your life in any way involves the Middle East you’ll definitely have a handle on it. Agreed a century ago today, and accepted in principle by the relevant Allied governments on 16 May 1916, it is notorious as documentary proof that Britain and France intended to carve up the Middle East between them after the First World War.

Actually called the Asia Minor Agreement, the document was the fruit of six months’ discussion and negotiation between Sir Mark Sykes, a British diplomat and politician, and François Georges-Picot, a French diplomat and lawyer. These were relatively obscure civil servants, and it is a measure of what is generally seen these days as imperial arrogance on the part of Britain and France that they were given responsibility for drawing a new map of the Middle East, to be imposed if and when the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

The deal looks disgraceful now, but seemed logical enough, unexceptional even, to anyone operating by the imperial standards of the nineteenth century, and has an internal logic in the context of First World War realpolitik. Victory was likely to see the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Triple Entente powers – Britain, France and Russia – all harboured longstanding ambitions when it came to partitioning the cadaver, as did their relatively new ally, Italy. If an arrangement could be made while they were all friends, why risk the danger and inconvenience of post-War squabbling?

The Russians weren’t involved in Anglo-French discussions because the French and British had promised Constantinople to the Tsar in March 1915, in return for a free hand further south, and Russia was the only candidate for control of the Kurdish and Armenian territories to the northeast of the Ottoman Empire. Italy was left to its own devices in Libya (Ottoman North Africa wasn’t covered by the Agreement), but was otherwise expected to do as it was told and took no part in the discussion process.

As drafted in 1916, and mapped out below in its original pomp, the Agreement gave France effective control over Syria, the Lebanon and Turkish Cilicia (the coastal area north of Syria). Britain was to take control of Mesopotamia as far north as Baghdad, along with effective economic dominance over Palestine and what was then called Transjordan. Italy’s designated ‘sphere of influence’ was Turkish Anatolia, Jerusalem was to be governed by an unspecified international authority, and those parts of Arabia not already taken were to remain independent, though under British or French supervision. The latter can be seen as a nod to arrangements already made with Arab leaders, as outlined a few months back (26 December, 1915: Boxing Clever), or as an indication that neither Britain nor France saw much plunder in Arabia’s barren tribal deserts.

Even in 1916, imperial partition of territories to which the only credible claim was greed were not good for the popular or international reputations of empires. That was one good reason for keeping the carve-ups secret; another was the opportunity for double-dealing provided by secrecy. Just as the Treaty of London between the Entente and Italy had been kept secret, hiding Italy’s greed and her new allies’ tendency to give things away twice, so the Sykes-Picot Agreement was kept under wraps, enabling the British in particular to make promises they had no intention of keeping to the leaders of the Arab Revolt.

Like the Treaty of London and other secret international deals, Sykes-Picot was exposed to the world by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution in Russia, planting an entirely justified mistrust of Anglo-French motives in the minds of Arab leaders that affected the latter stages of the fighting in the Middle East, soured relations at the Paris Peace Conference, made a liar of TE Lawrence (of whom more next year) and has never really gone away. Exposure of the agreement also managed to outrage Zionists, coming as it did only three weeks after the Balfour Declaration (of which, again, more another day).

In November 1918, a year after Sykes-Picot went public, the British government dumped it. The French had little choice about signing an Anglo-French Declaration that officially superseded the Agreement, promising to encourage and supervise the development of stable sovereign states in the region. Though partly designed to improve the British Empire’s international image as the War ended, and to ease negotiations with Arab leaders, the Declaration was also seen in London as an opportunity to wriggle out of its commitment to accepting French supervision of the Syrian region (marked ‘A’ on the map).

Whatever the motives behind them, the Declaration’s fine words made no difference to anything in practice. Though Russian territorial ambitions had disappeared with the Revolution, and Italy’s claims were overruled at the Paris Peace Conference, something very close to the simple, Eurocentric convenience of the Sykes-Picot map was established in the post-War Middle East. Arab attempts to achieve full independence were met by a combination of military intervention and diplomatic finesse by the British and French, who imposed spheres of influence in the guise of ‘mandates’. Mandates were, in theory, territories being nurtured for full independence by their European guardians on the authority of the new League of Nations, but the planned fate of one British mandate, Palestine, was left conveniently vague.

I’m leaping ahead into areas that deserve a closer look, and they’ll get one, because this story’s going to run and run. As for Sykes-Picot, of course it was a bad idea, and of course the Middle East is still suffering from the imposition of artificial borders – but no agreement or declaration by European belligerents in 1916 was more than a minor tactic in a Great Power game that presumed territorial and economic acquisition as the just rewards for a victorious warfare gambit.

The European powers were always intent on carving up the Middle East if they defeated Turkey, but neither Britain nor France saw Sykes-Picot as more than a standard opening gambit, a blueprint to be modified according to circumstance or opportunity. So for all its well-earned notoriety, the Agreement was nothing special or substantial – and nothing like the defining moment an angry posterity likes to portray.

Out in Mesopotamia, at Sheikh Sa’ad, on the Tigris just southeast of Kut, the first British attempt to relieve General Townshend’s besieged force was in the process of failing, suffering some 4,000 casualties and gaining a single line of trenches before Turkish defenders withdrew. In Gallipoli, the Anglo-French evacuation was finally drawing to an end, and the Russian Army in Galicia was spending its Christmas Day in a hopeless struggle against Austro-Hungarian artillery. But that’s enough fighting and dying, let’s talk about Arthur Henderson’s trip to the Netherlands.

Henderson was a British politician. At the time he was President of the Board of Education, a member of the cabinet and leader of the Labour Party, one of only three Labour politicians to serve in the coalition government. A hundred years ago he was in The Hague, charged with talking Dutch workers, business leaders and politicians into shaping their national economy according to British war aims. The visit was a watershed moment in a long saga that reflected the changing geopolitics of the age, and that began in August 1914.

For the Netherlands, a small nation dependent on seagoing trade, next door to Germany and across the water from Britain, the outbreak of war was a diplomatic disaster. With no dog in the fight, nothing to gain and everything to lose by declaring war on bigger powers, the Dutch could only remain neutral, but that didn’t spare them pressure from both sides as the conflict got underway.

Assured by Germany on 2 August that its territorial integrity would be respected, the government in The Hague turned down a British offer of alliance and instead closed the Scheldt to all warships, a technically neutral move but one that favoured Germany by protecting the flank of its advancing armies from the Royal Navy. This was hardly a choice for the Dutch, given that any other response might trigger a German invasion, but of course it annoyed the British, who announced that they would respect Dutch neutrality – unless it became ‘one-sided’.

In fact the British, certain that naval blockade was the key to undermining Germany’s war effort, treated the Netherlands (and other neutral countries with strong trading links to Germany) as if they were economic enemies from the start. By the end of August 1914, the Royal Navy had stopped more than fifty Dutch ships and seized three loads of American grain bound for the Netherlands, while the UK government had stated its intention to prevent food, as well as war materials, from reaching Germany via neutral ports. As the year went on the British blockade tightened, wreaking havoc on the flow of trade from America that was fundamental to Dutch economic stability.

Compelled to appease the British, the Dutch government managed to reduce ‘stop and search’ delays to transatlantic trade by forming the country’s leading banks and businesses into a consortium, the Netherlands Oversea Trust (NOT). As a private company, and so able to liaise with the British without compromising Dutch neutrality, the NOT acted as a clearing-house for imported goods and guaranteed that contraband (as defined by the British) wouldn’t be sold on to Germany. The British, happy to be handed effective control over Dutch transatlantic imports, generously agreed a temporary relaxation of blockade against goods from the Dutch East Indies. For a year or so relations between the two countries were relatively smooth, as was Dutch passage across the Atlantic, and the British went on to use the NOT as a blueprint for addressing the contraband issue in other neutral states.

Generally speaking, having witnessed at close hand the effects of occupation on Belgium, Dutch politicians, businessmen and civilians were sympathetic to the Allies throughout the War – but the NOT agreement put the neutrality boot on the other foot, and now the Dutch could only appease Germany. Germany needed food and raw materials, and so 1915 saw a boom in the trade of home-produced Dutch goods across the frontier. Dutch exports to Germany in 1915 ran at almost four times pre-War levels, with agricultural produce dominating the market, and were still rising at the end of the year.

So of course the British spent 1915 lobbying the Dutch to stop ‘feeding the enemy’, but diplomatic efforts didn’t cut much ice against the threat of occupation, and by late summer the Royal Navy was again stopping, searching and seizing Dutch transatlantic merchant traffic. In September, recognising the impossibility of a complete ban on exports from the Netherlands to Germany, the British accepted an agreement ‘rationing’ Dutch import levels of staple foods and oil to pre-War levels, a measure that would at least reduce the surplus available for export. Unfortunately for the Dutch, this essentially reasonable compromise didn’t last the autumn.

I’ve already mentioned that the military disappointments of the year, and of the autumn in particular, had left British war leadership at a crossroads, short on ideas but bent on change and looking for scapegoats (19 December, 1915: The Empire’s New Clothes). By the end of the year political and military opinion in Britain had decided one key to shortening the War was a tighter naval blockade of Germany, and so Henderson was sent to The Hague to finalise the rationing agreement and bully the Dutch into further concessions.

Henderson got nowhere, but his failure did trigger political reform of the British blockade system. In February, the various departments in various ministries concerned with blockade were merged under a new Minister of Blockade, Sir Robert Cecil. Cecil renewed pressure on The Hague during the spring, forcing an agreement that required Dutch farmers to sell half their exports to Britain. The farmers refused to cooperate, unsurprisingly when the British paid far less than the Germans, and the so-called Agricultural Agreement soon collapsed, so that by the summer of 1916 the Royal Navy was back at work making life miserable for Dutch merchantmen and, by way of sending a message, doing the same to the Dutch fishing fleet.

Once again caught between a rock and a hard navy, facing immediate shortages and unsustainable economic disruption, the Dutch could only accept an invitation to renegotiate the Agricultural Agreement. When a final version of the Agreement was signed on 1 November 1916, the British finally got what they wanted, genuine (or at least general) cooperation in the enforcement of quotas on Dutch exports to Germany.

The wartime battle for the Dutch economy was over. Food and other exports to Germany from the Netherlands were significantly reduced after 1916, and the British retained effective control over Dutch trading patterns for the rest of the War. But it had been a struggle and, apart from pointing out that Britain treated its good neighbours in the Netherlands as ciphers to be ruthlessly exploited in 1916, that’s the small point of today’s ramble.

In the century of relative peace before 1914, the British Empire had become accustomed to flexing its gigantic economic muscles and dictating policy to small European countries, comfortable in the knowledge that it was far and away the toughest bully in the playground. Britain still wielded the world’s biggest stick during the First World War, but with resources stretched and in the face of serious competition it had to be sharpened and used with greater precision. This was the lesson learned during the shadow war for Dutch cooperation, a clear signpost to an impoverished British Empire’s more modest position in the post-War world.